Edmund Spenser

Edmund Spenser's innovative poetic works have a central place in the canon of English literature. Yet he is remembered as a morally flawed self-interested sycophant; complicit in England's ruthless colonisation of Ireland; in Karl Marx's words 'Elizabeth's arse-kissing poet'-- a man on the<br>make who aspired to be at court and who was prepared to exploit the Irish to get what he wanted. <p/>In his vibrant and vivid book the first biography of the poet for 60 years Andrew Hadfield finds a more complex and subtle Spenser. How did a man who seemed destined to become a priest or a don become embroiled in politics? If he was intent on social climbing why was he so astonishingly rude to<br>the good and the great Lord Burghley the earl of Leicester Sir Walter Ralegh Elizabeth I and James VI? Why was he more at home with 'the middling sort' -- writers publishers and printers bureaucrats soldiers academics secretaries and clergymen -- than with the mighty and the powerful? How<br>did the appalling slaughter he witnessed in Ireland impact on his imaginative powers? How did his marriage and family life shape his work? <p/>Spenser's brilliant writing has always challenged our preconceptions. So too Hadfield shows does the contradictory relationship between his between life and his art.<br>